Buy why that much? The first computer I bought had 192MB of RAM and I ran a 1600x1200 desktop with 24-bit color. When Windows 2000 came out, all of the transparency effects ran great. Office worked fine, Visual Studio, 1024x768 gaming (I know that’s quite a step down from 1080p).

What has changed? Why do I need 10x the RAM to open a handful of terminals and a text editor?

> and I ran a 1600x1200 desktop with 24-bit color

> What has changed? Why do I need 10x the RAM to open a handful of terminals and a text editor?

It’s not a factor of ten, but a 4K monitor has about four times as many pixels. Cached font bitmaps scale with that, photos take more memory, etc.

> When Windows 2000 came out

In those times, when part of a window became uncovered, the OS would ask the application to redraw that part. Nowadays, the OS knows what’s there because it keeps the pixels around, so it can bitblit the pixels in.

Again, not a factor of ten, but it contributes.

The number of background processes likely also increased, and chances are you used to run fewer applications at the same time. Your handful of terminals may be a bit fuller now than it was back then.

Neither of those really explain why you need gigabytes of RAM nowadays, though, but they didn’t explain why Windows 2000 needed whatever it needed at its time, either.

The main real reason is “because we can afford to”.

Partly because we have more layers of abstraction. Just an extreme example, when you open a tiny < 1KB HTML file on any modern browser the tab memory consumption will still be on the order of tens, if not hundreds of megabytes. This is because the browser has to load / initialize all its huge runtime environment (JS / DOM / CSS, graphics, etc) even though that tiny HTML file might use a tiny fraction of the browser features.

Partly because increased RAM usage can sometimes improve execution speed / smoothness or security (caching, browser tab isolation).

Partly because developers have less pressure to optimize software performance, so they optimize other things, such as development time.

Here is an article about bloat: https://waspdev.com/articles/2025-11-04/some-software-bloat-...

2 Programmers sat at a table. One was a youngster and the other an older guy with a large beard. The old guy was asked: "You. Yeah you. Why the heck did you need 64K of RAM?". The old man replied, "To land on the moon!". Then the youngster was asked: "And you, why oh why did you need 4Gig?". The youngster replied: "To run MS-Word!"

Higher res icons probably add a couple hundred megs alone